Also been playing Destiny more, for some reason. It's a crap game that I bought TWICE. I bought it the first time on launch, and became addicted to it's skinner box bs despite how shallow of a game it is, and traded it in, and then I bought it again because I missed playing with friends, and they somehow managed to make it WORSE. The "Fun with friends" part is really starting to wear thin. If you're ever thinking of buying it, don't, just save your money for a good game. I mean, it's not totally crap, it does have redeeming features, just not a whole lot.

I couldn't get interested in Destiny. One of my friends is a ginormous Bungie fanboy and tried to sell me on it but no matter excited he was about it he still made it sound like a horrific and hugely unfun grind fest. Then the reviews and gameplay vids I watched didn't change that initial impression.

Grinding is its biggest issue. It's just a total skinner box. For example... In PvP and PvE you can earn "Marks", a special currency that can be used to buy shit from special PvE and PvP vendors selling arms and armor. You earn marks by doing activities in PvE, or playing PvP... The thing is, at least in PvP, you only earn 2 marks if you lose, or 3 if you win. I recently bought a rifle using PvP marks. How much did it cost? 150 Marks, that's a fucking lot of PvP. Oh yeah, and there's a cap of how much you can earn per week, so if you start the week off with zero, and earn the max (which is like 200 or something), you'll only have enough for one item from the vendors per week from each PvP and PvE. It doesn't stop there though, you know how I said that it was worse when I picked it up again later? Before, you just needed marks to buy stuff from these vendors, but now you have to earn a bunch of experience and level up the PvE or PvP to earn a special "Commendation" point. So you need to grind for these marks, and you need to grind to level up the PvE or PvP before you can buy stuff from these vendors.

The other thing is the RNG (Random Number Generator). A lot of what you do has a chance to give you a rare item, but like any other games with loot mechanics, it's totally random. So, at the end of PvP matches you have a chance of getting something good, the thing is aside from earning one less mark if you lose, there's no consequence to losing in PvP, you can lose horribly and still get a very rare weapon, or armor piece. So you just keep playing and playing, hoping that maybe you'll get something good. That's how they get you addicted, the chance of earning something good when you play, that's the skinner box.

Repetitive. The game is repetitive as balls. You retrace footsteps a lot, a lot of levels will bring you back to places you've been to before, and all the major bosses are just bigger and tougher versions of common enemies. Even the final boss of the game is just you fighting a boss you fought earlier in the game, just three times in a row, and even then that boss is just a copy paste of a common enemy.

There's basically no story. There's the foundation for a story. In the pre release stuff it really seemed like they had something cool going on, but at some point the writer for the game (Joseph Staten, who also did the writing for Halo) left, and it seems like after he left they just canned the story and started over from scratch. So you go into the game and it tells you very, very little. There's little collectibles you can pick up which have lore (which can only be fucking viewed online, I might add), but it's still not a whole lot.

What does the game get right? The gameplay is solid like Bungie's past games, the art and visuals are awesome, it has some great music, it has an all-star cast (wasted talent, unfortunately, as pretty much all the good voice actors just voice merchants with random bits of dialogue). The PvP is pretty fun, for awhile.

So unless you wanna grind more than teens at a rave, it's just worth avoiding.

Five Night's at Freddy's is an indie horror survival game that came out last August. Since it came out the Sequel/Prequel Five Night's at Freddy's 2 came out last November and the third game in the series is already being teased. It became a viral sensation based on the original premise and the infamous difficulty of "4/20" mode, a custom game mode unlocked after completing the game that is so difficult the creator orginally believed it to be impossible. There's a wiki for it but I really wouldn't recommend reading it before playing the game, only check it out after you've either beaten it or gotten stuck and need guidance. The game will lose a lot of its inherent creepiness if you understand the mechanics of the game completely before playing because trial and error regarding the enemy behavior is one of the key things that makes the game creepy and difficult.

It's not expensive (7 bucks or so on steam and 3 bucks for the mobile version) and it's appeared on sale and in at least one indie bundle for dirt cheap. The wiki is at http://freddy-fazbears-pizza.wikia.com if you decide you want more info.

Five Nights at Freddy's 3 dropped on Steam today and I already got past the first two nights. And... it's creepier than the second one, possibly even creepier than the first. Gone are the split second precision camera flips I'm used to. The reaction time of everything in the game has been slowed down to increase the feeling of risk and... it works. I stopped after the second night because I literally couldn't take anymore if I want to get any sleep tonight. So many subtle tweaks to the concept while at the same time stripping away some of the almost overwhelming array of things that were going on in the second game. In a word... creepy.